What if you decided to build a hybrid storage drive for a system based on something other than Intel Z68 chipset? HighPoint released their RocketHybrid 1220 controller, which allows creating a hybrid drive using a fast SSD and an inexpensive HDD with large storage capacity. Will the HighPoint controller be able to challenge Intel Smart Response? Let’s find out!

Performance

First let’s see the results of the five runs of each test with each disk subsystem configuration. For better readability, the diagrams are split up into three parts according to the load time and application type.

The first diagram for each configuration shows the speed of loading the OS and the 3D game scenes. They take the longest time to load.

The second diagram is about Futuremark’s benchmarks.

The third diagram contains the rest of the test applications, namely Microsoft Office 2007 and Adobe Photoshop CS 5.1.

We’ll start out by establishing the reference point with the single HDD and the single SSD. Then we will check out the hybrid subsystems based on Intel Smart Response technology and on the HighPoint RocketHybrid 1220 controller.

HDD

This is the slowest disk subsystem among the configurations we are going to test, yet it is not hopelessly slow. Thanks to Prefetcher and SuperFetch technologies the loading time of many applications improves after the OS is rebooted. These Windows 7 features would be even more effective if our testbed had more system memory.

SSD

Although the conventional HDD improves the loading time of the OS and applications on their subsequent runs, it cannot match the SSD. The HDD’s best results are worse than the SSD’s worst ones.

We can also note that the SSD makes use of Prefetcher and SuperFetch although the effect of these technologies is not as conspicuous as with the HDD.